outline-rbac-mcp

Role-based access plugin for Outline, built as a standalone MCP server over the Outline REST API. No changes to the Outline server required.

Each person connects with their own Outline API key. The plugin resolves who the key belongs to and their workspace role, then only exposes the operations that role is entitled to.

How access is decided — the role graph

Roles are nodes in a directed graph; each role inherits every capability of the roles below it:

admin ──▶ member ──▶ viewer ──▶ guest

Effective permissions are resolved by walking the inheritance edges (BFS) and unioning capabilities.

Related MCP server: Outline knowledge base MCP Server

The workflow pipeline

Every tool call flows through a staged workflow — a failure at any node short-circuits the call:

authenticate ─▶ resolve_role ─▶ authorize ─▶ execute ─▶ audit

• authenticate — verifies the API key against auth.info

• resolve_role — reads the caller's role, resolves capabilities from the graph

• authorize — rejects the call if the role lacks the tool's required capability

• execute — proxies to the Outline REST API

• audit — records actor, role, tool, outcome, and per-stage timing (admins can read it via audit_log)

Tools

Denied calls return DENIED: role "<role>" lacks capability "<capability>".

Install (per user)

1. Create your API key in Outline: Settings → API & Apps → New API key

2. Install from the packaged tarball (or from npm once published):

npm install -g ./outline-rbac-mcp-1.0.0.tgz   # or: npm install -g outline-rbac-mcp

claude mcp add outline-rbac \
  --env OUTLINE_URL=https://outline.knowaiclub.com \
  --env OUTLINE_API_KEY=<your-personal-api-key> \
  -- outline-rbac-mcp

The package also ships a Claude Code plugin manifest (.claude-plugin/plugin.json + .mcp.json), so the repo can be installed as a Claude Code plugin from a marketplace; set OUTLINE_URL and OUTLINE_API_KEY in your shell environment and the plugin's MCP server picks them up.

From source

cd outline_test && npm install

claude mcp add outline-rbac \
  --env OUTLINE_URL=https://outline.knowaiclub.com \
  --env OUTLINE_API_KEY=<your-personal-api-key> \
  -- node /path/to/outline_test/src/server.js

Works the same in Claude Desktop / Cursor as a stdio MCP server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "outline-rbac": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/outline_test/src/server.js"],
      "env": {
        "OUTLINE_URL": "https://outline.knowaiclub.com",
        "OUTLINE_API_KEY": "<your-personal-api-key>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Smoke test

TEST_KEY=<api-key> node test/smoke.js whoami access_graph 'list_users={}'